Re:Linux stocks falling independently of market
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
·
· Score: 1
LNUX was HORRIDLY over-valued in any case. Looking at it objectively, I didn't consider it much of a investment (for either financial or political reasons!) once the price jumped. While it's rise wasn't that much of a mystery to me (given general linux fever, and the (un)fortunate designation of LNUX), I can easily understand it being hot-potatoed once people got a good look at what they'd paid hundreds of dollars for. --
"This sounds like a job for Open Source If DirectPlay is a known API, it may be possible to code a replacement for it which includes additions which is compatible with what DirectPlay does, but includes extensions which allow support for NATs. -- Then make it available to game designers. What I'm basically saying is: Take MS's "embrace and extend" and use it in reverse. It seems to me that a simple 'fix' to the protocol is to use the last octet of a clients internal IP as a hash to decide which UDP port to use. combine that with the auto-routing of UDP mentioned above, and you have a somewhat hacked solution -- granted, it doesn't work well for larger (i.e. company-wide) private networks, but it would handle most home setups, and the majority of company nets (at least, those that want to allow gaming for their employees!). That having been said, I'm not willing to do it myself. I've avoided Wintendos for it's entire live, and I've done ZERO coding for it. The best I could would be to coordinate a project. --
For the 75%+ of people interested palmtops who are also in range of wireless, the added expense of wireless as an add-on would be unpleasant. The economies of scale would probably result in an extra $5-10 manufacturing cost. This would give $20-50 at retail. You'd never get that kind of price for a retail add-on. Then there's installation.... That having been said, an add-on would be nice for me. I just bought a IIIe and I don't intend to upgrade anytime soon. --
Well, the one thing that was missed was that the whole kit and kaboodle is still floating through space.
About the only thing missing was "sundown"....
A friend of mine (Tom Cantine) once created a flat world. Near the Western reaches of the world was an area called Sundown. You see, the sun in this universe was a flaming ball of fire that was (each day) lit and thrown across the sky by some semigod.
Unfortunately, he would sometimes get distracted, have a cold, etc. and the sun wouldn't quit make it to the other side of the world. Sundown was an area which, had semi-recently (about 30 years previous) been wiped out by one such mis-thrown sun. There were rumored to be areas, even further west, where ill-thrown suns fell far more frequently. People were said to rarely go out to the western reaches of Sundown, and even more rarely to come back.
Very pratchet-like.
In Reaper Man you meet Death during a period of unemployment (Death gets laid off -- with some interesting (and sometimes bothersome) side effects for the would-be dead and their friends, families and even enemies). It includes characters such as The Death of Rats (you don't think that Death only exists for humans, do you?).
For me, one of the funniest parts is where he's interviewed for a job as a farmhand. ("Do you know how to use a scythe?/ YES...")
Soul Music is about a new (magical) form of music, created by a band which includes a stone golum. Rock music. Obviously a take-off on (among other things) the music industry.
Pyramids includes a take-off on Egyptian history.
The Wyrd sisters start with a version of Shakespeare's 3 witches.
Sourcery starts with the idea of a Seventh Son of a Seventh Son being a wizard -- except that on discworld it's the eighth son of an Eighth son of an eighth son. The other majour character is death's grand-daughter who "takes over the family business", but -- having been trained as a tooth fairy, she keeps being mistaken as one.
Hogfather is about the christmas season gone mad (it includes the demi-god of hangovers).
In any case, just about every Pratchet story plays on
various pieces of myth and history. Very little of it survives unscathed.
--
Re:Definitive ref on "cold fusion" (Re:Too bad...)
on
The Quest For Fusion
·
· Score: 1
The comment was "Too bad Pons and Fleischmann had it wrong... " Cold Fusion -- had it worked -- would have made the whole fight for fusion power soooo much easier. Just think about it for a moment -- No billion dollar reactor in sunken pools with dozens of people crawling about them for power a billionth of a second at a time. It would have been a chunk of metal in a bottle with a couple of electrodes. If you can find a compact way to extract heavy water with electricity -- PRESTO, an almost closed loop. The next best thing to the perpetual motion machine. Just add water and stir.
It's not to say that there's no recogniton of the value and difficulty of what's going on at Sandia and elswhere. It's just that cold fusion would have solved more problems than hot fusion.
If hot fusion is the Holy Grail, Cold Fusion would have been like the resurrection itself. It's just too bad that it doesn't seem to work. (not to say that some people aren't still trying).
`ø,,ø!
When Unix was first developed, AT&T was in a legal catch-22. They couldn't block the release of the technology, and they couldn't market it (They lost two separate lawsuits on the two issues).
The answer was simple:
Sign this non-disclosure agreement and give us money ($100 for universities, $10K+ for companies). In return you will get a dump of a working system, including source code."
Although it wasn't a GNU license, justabout anybody who had UNIX had the source code, and you could share the code with anybody who had a license (i.e. just about everybody with UNIX) -- all you had to do is prove you had an appropriate license.
The reason why UNIX gained popularity in the Research community is precisely the same reason why LINUX is popular now.... At $100/site license for a University, it might as well have been free -- and people could stomp on any buggy code, or even create their own improvements.
As companies like SUN started coming out with 'proprietary' versions of UNIX, and limiting the access to their source-code (based on the work of thousands of grad students), it is only "A coincidence" that the Free Software movement (e.g. GNU) started to gain prominence at the same time (yea, right!).
LINUX is really just a continuation of the origins of UNIX popularity (with a 1-decade diversion thrown in)
my personal web page (put up for a completely different reason) expresses this idea in a completely different way.
When Unix was first developed, AT&T was in a legal catch-22. They couldn't block the release of the technology, and they couldn't market it (They lost two separate lawsuits on the two issues). The answer was simple: Sign this non-disclosure agreement and give us money ($100 for universities, $10K+ for companies). In return you would get a dump of a working system, including source code. Although it wasn't a GNU license, justabout anybody who had UNIX had the source code, and you could share the code with anybody who had a license (i.e. just about everybody with UNIX) -- all you had to do is prove you had a license. The reason why UNIX gained popularity in the Research community is precisely the same reason why LINUX is popular now.... At $100/site license for a University, it might as well have been free -- and people could stomp on any buggy code, or even create their own improvements. As companies like SUN started coming out with 'proprietary' versions of UNIX, and limiting the access to their source-code (based on the work of thousands of grad students), it is only "A COINCIDENCE" that the Free Software movement (e.g. GNU) started to gain prominence at the same time (yea, right!).
Slashdot Mirror
LNUX was HORRIDLY over-valued in any case. Looking at it objectively, I didn't consider it much of a investment (for either financial or political reasons!) once the price jumped. While it's rise wasn't that much of a mystery to me (given general linux fever, and the (un)fortunate designation of LNUX), I can easily understand it being hot-potatoed once people got a good look at what they'd paid hundreds of dollars for.
--
"This sounds like a job for Open Source
If DirectPlay is a known API, it may be possible to code a replacement for it which includes additions which is compatible with what DirectPlay does, but includes extensions which allow support for NATs. -- Then make it available to game designers.
What I'm basically saying is: Take MS's "embrace and extend" and use it in reverse.
It seems to me that a simple 'fix' to the protocol is to use the last octet of a clients internal IP as a hash to decide which UDP port to use. combine that with the auto-routing of UDP mentioned above, and you have a somewhat hacked solution -- granted, it doesn't work well for larger (i.e. company-wide) private networks, but it would handle most home setups, and the majority of company nets (at least, those that want to allow gaming for their employees!).
That having been said, I'm not willing to do it myself. I've avoided Wintendos for it's entire live, and I've done ZERO coding for it. The best I could would be to coordinate a project.
--
For the 75%+ of people interested palmtops who are also in range of wireless, the added expense of wireless as an add-on would be unpleasant. The economies of scale would probably result in an extra $5-10 manufacturing cost. This would give $20-50 at retail. You'd never get that kind of price for a retail add-on.
Then there's installation....
That having been said, an add-on would be nice for me. I just bought a IIIe and I don't intend to upgrade anytime soon.
--
- Genius: Thinks differently than most other people
- Insanity: Thinks Differently than most other people
logicnazi writes: Coincidince???? I don't think so!--
For me, one of the funniest parts is where he's interviewed for a job as a farmhand. ("Do you know how to use a scythe?/ YES...")
Soul Music is about a new (magical) form of music, created by a band which includes a stone golum. Rock music. Obviously a take-off on (among other things) the music industry.
Pyramids includes a take-off on Egyptian history.
The Wyrd sisters start with a version of Shakespeare's 3 witches.
Sourcery starts with the idea of a Seventh Son of a Seventh Son being a wizard -- except that on discworld it's the eighth son of an Eighth son of an eighth son. The other majour character is death's grand-daughter who "takes over the family business", but -- having been trained as a tooth fairy, she keeps being mistaken as one.
Hogfather is about the christmas season gone mad (it includes the demi-god of hangovers).
In any case, just about every Pratchet story plays on various pieces of myth and history. Very little of it survives unscathed.
--
It's not to say that there's no recogniton of the value and difficulty of what's going on at Sandia and elswhere. It's just that cold fusion would have solved more problems than hot fusion.
If hot fusion is the Holy Grail, Cold Fusion would have been like the resurrection itself. It's just too bad that it doesn't seem to work. (not to say that some people aren't still trying).
`ø,,ø!
The answer was simple:
Although it wasn't a GNU license, justabout anybody who had UNIX had the source code, and you could share the code with anybody who had a license (i.e. just about everybody with UNIX) -- all you had to do is prove you had an appropriate license.
The reason why UNIX gained popularity in the Research community is precisely the same reason why LINUX is popular now.... At $100/site license for a University, it might as well have been free -- and people could stomp on any buggy code, or even create their own improvements.
As companies like SUN started coming out with 'proprietary' versions of UNIX, and limiting the access to their source-code (based on the work of thousands of grad students), it is only "A coincidence" that the Free Software movement (e.g. GNU) started to gain prominence at the same time (yea, right!).
LINUX is really just a continuation of the origins of UNIX popularity (with a 1-decade diversion thrown in)
my personal web page (put up for a completely different reason) expresses this idea in a completely different way.
When Unix was first developed, AT&T was in a legal catch-22. They couldn't block the release of the technology, and they couldn't market it (They lost two separate lawsuits on the two issues). The answer was simple: Sign this non-disclosure agreement and give us money ($100 for universities, $10K+ for companies). In return you would get a dump of a working system, including source code. Although it wasn't a GNU license, justabout anybody who had UNIX had the source code, and you could share the code with anybody who had a license (i.e. just about everybody with UNIX) -- all you had to do is prove you had a license. The reason why UNIX gained popularity in the Research community is precisely the same reason why LINUX is popular now.... At $100/site license for a University, it might as well have been free -- and people could stomp on any buggy code, or even create their own improvements. As companies like SUN started coming out with 'proprietary' versions of UNIX, and limiting the access to their source-code (based on the work of thousands of grad students), it is only "A COINCIDENCE" that the Free Software movement (e.g. GNU) started to gain prominence at the same time (yea, right!).